Title is a bit of a loaded question but I tried to fit it into one sentence.
Do you think Lemmy’s search and use functions are hurt by all the communities that were made and abandoned during the 2023 Redditfugee influx? As in, do you think that Lemmy would be better off if some of these communities were consolidated into larger general pages until it gets a big enough user base to warrant individual communities for specific TV shows, for example.
Kbin / Mbin actually fixed this by allowing if a Community isn’t managed for 3 months by mods then it will be available for people to claim to admin. This allows people to keep the Community going and hopefully blow some life into it.
I seem to recall on reddit there were a lot of subs that somehow had mods who modded hundreds of subs, and didn’t participate and weren’t a part of the actual communities. It seemed these people just liked collecting subs. I’d worry that with an automated system people like this (or even bots) will show up, and just start squatting (so to speak) on the mod rights to communities. Time will tell, I guess, with growth.
@ragica it’s worked the opposite way so far.
People who made a bunch of communities and then didn’t participate are the ones who were displaced after the update by active mods. I help out at a couple like that myself.
The system can always be tweaked if it doesn’t scale right, but for now it’s been quite revitalizing.
That already happens “manually”. Two of the communities I mod were originally created by community name squatters who grabbed a bunch of “popular” names and then basically abandoned the site the same day. One of those two users had created 25+ communities just to sit on the names. And one of the “partner communities” on a different instance was created by someone who put zero effort into creating content - they only opened a magazine and expected others to do all the work, then eventually abandoned it when they lost interest (hasn’t been online in 2 months). Luckily that magazine was recently adopted by someone who seems a lot more invested and active, but that doesn’t change the fact that the magazine had been “dead” for months prior to the new owner taking over.
Granted, an automated system would make it easier for squatters to just kinda program a queue of communities they want to grab, but the problem itself already exists even without an automated system.
This, plus people can claim it and delete it if that makes more sense.
Yeah it’s one of the many reasons I use Kbin / Mbin over Lemmy. Really hope features like that come to Lemmy in the future.
We already have such a feature tho. Two of the communities I mod were “adopted” because the original creators abandoned them.
Does it do it automatically or do you have to request from the admins of the instance?
You have to request them on [email protected] … and sadly it is not yet well-known. Automating the procedure (like making a community freely availiable after 6 months or so) would make adopting them a whole lot easier, but the additional hurdle of having to ask a supporter first means that they can decide on a case-by-case basis which lowers the risk of trolls taking over communities just to mess with them.
Both have their pro’s and con’s.
On Kbin it’s automated, but so far if a community is active they’re the ones who’re likely to request to own it, and if a troll took it the others could bring it up with Ernest at that point.
Me too. I get the impression we might have better discoverability in terms of being able to see what’s active, and who is doing what where, as well.
Anxiety about the existence of inactive or small communities seems to be more of a Lemmy thing.